Winterburn businesses frustrated by minimal services and rising taxes

After more than 35 years, it’s time for the city to pave the Winterburn industrial area’s “deplorable” roads and provide other necessary services, the president of the local business group says.

“We’re living within the city limits, but without high-grade roads, no transit service, no sewer, no water, no sidewalks, no nothing,” said Brad Abel, head of the Winterburn Business Association and president of equipment rental and service firm Ketek Group.

“There’s lots of industrial traffic, and (vehicles) get beat to heck. I employ a few hundred people here, and it’s a little difficult to attract people.”

The 1,060-hectare commercial park on Edmonton’s western edge was created as part of Parkland County, which didn’t require companies developing sites in the district to put in the level of amenities found next door in the city.

Instead, the operators were able to use well water, haul out sewage by truck and drive on roads built to less-demanding rural requirements with gravel or a light form of asphalt.

Edmonton took over the land between Anthony Henday Drive, 231 Street, Yellowhead Trail and Stony Plain Road as part of annexations that happened in 1982, but the standards didn’t change.

Abel says property taxes for the annexed land were initially kept at the county level, but that deal expired decades ago — a dozen association members reported in an informal survey their 2018 taxes rose an average of 22 per cent from the previous year.

Even people walking to jobs in the area from the nearby Westview Village mobile home park are affected, he said.

“It’s ridiculous. You feel bad. The roads are deplorable, and without lighting these guys are in trouble … Someone with some balls has to intervene and say we need to put some city funding into this,” he said.

Brad Abel, president of the Winterburn Business Association and president of Ketek Group, shown on July 5, 2018, is lobbying the city to put in sewers, water lines, paved roads and other services in the Winterburn Industrial Park in Edmonton.

“It’s unacceptable … We want transit to come here to bring minimum-wage workers to us, we want roads that aren’t destroying our vehicles and dis-incentivizing people to come to work for us.”

Coun. Andrew Knack says another issue is that businesses in Winterburn and other former county industrial areas such as southeast Edmonton’s Maple Ridge apparently contribute money to the neighbourhood renewal program even though the program doesn’t cover them.

He plans to make a motion at Tuesday’s city council meeting asking whether sufficient maintenance is now being performed in these areas.

He also wants to look at whether the standards should stay the same or be updated and, if it appears improvements are worthwhile, how long they should take to complete, who should pay for them and how much extra tax revenue would be collected.

Knack hopes responses from administration come in October so the information is available for this fall’s budget debate, but he suspects doing the improvements makes sense.

“If we’re competing against unserviced industrial areas in the region, we’re probably not competitive … I think there’s likely a case to be made to say ‘Let’s bring them up to the modernized urban standard.’”

City spokeswoman Alexa Steiner would only say the administration is taking Knack’s motion seriously and gathering the information he requested.

“We are preparing for a fulsome conversation when the report comes back,” she stated in an email.

Abel hopes to be part of a pilot project to upgrade four kilometres of road around Ketek in which landowners and the city would split the expense, but he said work that was supposed to begin last fall still hasn’t started and he doesn’t know when it will happen.

He’s frustrated that his growing company wasn’t allowed to build offices on its 10-hectare Winterburn property at 20204 110 Ave. because of the lack of services, so he had to take space about 20 blocks away.

He has considered leaving, but so far has been stopped by the huge cost to relocate.

However, the area often loses firms to the Acheson Industrial Park, just across the border in Parkland County, where there’s sewer and water service and lower taxes, Abel says.

Although some companies don’t mind the minimalist conditions, Abel said most outfits he has spoken to agree with his position that Edmonton should pay for widespread improvements in Winterburn and Maple Ridge.